Filmatography is a production studio that offers creative filming and photography for high-end events. They've worked with clients and brands such as Aston Martin, Christian Dior, Bvlgari, Jennifer Lopez, and Davidoff to name a few and become a household name for many Royal families across the Middle East. Peter Rear is the CEO of Filmatography and founded the company on his own in 2003. Since then the company has rebranded and expanded to offices in Dubai and London. After switching from the PC world to a Mac in 2007, Peter found Daylite and has been using it to keep his business organized from the starting point of managing clients right up to post-production work after the event. We interviewed Peter to learn how he's been able to leverage Daylite to grow his business.
We provide a high end luxury service because we work with high end brands and clients. All our clients expect a perfect 5 star customer service from us. Daylite gives us the tools to make sure we can deliver exactly that and provides the backbone to the studio’s customer service and management. The way we’ve done this is by using Daylite’s Activity Sets.
We’ve worked out from start to finish the perfect archetype service for an event–for example a wedding. Everything from contact creation, the first email that needs to be sent to the client, touching base with the planner, the distribution of work to the crew, all the way to the event and providing feedback to the photographers for the production team, to creating the blog gallery, to the anniversary present after the event–everything is seamless. It’s distributed across the team in two countries without any need of communication. The structure is already set up. We can set tasks for people without needing to be in the same city and we can see all the history recorded automatically. That’s been the biggest thing. Also, my team is constantly travelling. Being able to log in and sync remotely is a great asset.
Before Daylite we were using ACT. The big thing Daylite has that ACT didn't have was pipelines. That was a big enhancement. The Mail integration was much better, setting tasks and being able to record history and communication seamlessly was really good and it was reliable and stable. But the big difference was we started (in addition to using tasks) using Activity Sets where we could set a series of events.
It's a fairly fluid interface. I like being able to be in a Project and then easily jump to the client or the event planner. I like the way that the links in Daylite allow you to browse through as well as see the different relationships really quickly. Another thing is seeing the history. A lot of our work is provided by agencies, planners, venues, and such. Daylite allows us to build up a history through projects and then use that information for future sales.
I really liked how I could customize Daylite to my business needs. That was one of the biggest things. I'm very much the kind of person that designs my own uses and I could see it had a very straight forward way to work. I could create my own Smart Lists and custom Pipelines–that was a big plus. The framework gave me the resources I needed to set up everything for my team. We're still perfecting it–we're changing all the time. That's another thing. I can change it. And I feel that Daylite is very integrated with the Mac. There were always problems before when we were on PCs. We made the switch to a Mac in 2007 and started looking for a Mac CRM. We found Daylite in the process and thought it was attractive as well as a solid Mac program.
Yes, definitely!
WebConnector, which is really good. We love that integration so we can look up where people are. In our industry people change a lot so WebConnector is brilliant. It helps us to get our contacts updated. We also use the MailChimp Connector**.
Put things in place to plan for a bigger business. Set up your business as if you were doing 20 times the volume of work. Make sure everything is ready for the next stage. Make your business ready for a bigger team. You need the vision of what you want to step into before you get there. That will help you in the future.
